Anyone Can Make a Call. Here’s How to Spot Who Makes Good Ones.

Picture this. Your support team is drowning. Tickets have doubled in two weeks, response times are slipping, and customers are getting angry. Your sharpest new hire walks in with a plan: hire three more support agents, fast. It’s decisive, it’s logical, and everyone in the room nods.

A month and three salaries later, someone finally reads the tickets. Most of them ask the same question, triggered by one confusing line in last week’s product update. Rewriting that line would have taken ten minutes.

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Your hire didn’t get the answer wrong. They got the question wrong. And nothing in their resume, or in your interview, would have told you that was coming.

We spend a lot of time at Unfound thinking about moments like this. Because “good decision-maker” shows up on nearly every job description, and almost no hiring process actually tests for it. What we’ve learned is that a good decision isn’t one moment. It’s a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and people tend to stumble in very different places.

Most bad decisions happen before anyone decides

The support-ticket story isn’t rare. It’s the classic trap: solve the first problem you see, and solve it quickly, because speed looks like competence. The people worth hiring pause for a beat and ask a slightly annoying question. What actually changed?

That pause is everything. It’s the difference between treating the fever and finding the infection.

Then comes the evidence, and here people fail in two opposite ways. Some barely look. They have a hunch and they run with it. Others can’t stop looking. One more report, one more data pull, one more week, because research feels safer than committing to anything.

The best people do something in between. They know which three facts matter for this decision, they check those, and they move on. They’re also healthily skeptical of where their facts come from, and in 2026 that includes AI. Asking an assistant is smart. Pasting its answer into a strategy doc without a second look is not.

The call itself: there’s always a cost

Be a little wary of any plan that’s faster, cheaper and better all at once. Real decisions involve giving something up. Strong decision-makers say out loud what they’re trading away, and they think hard about what happens if they’re wrong.

They also know not every call deserves the same care. Testing a new email subject line? Just try it. Signing a three-year vendor contract? Slow down. Treating a reversible choice like a permanent one wastes time. Treating a permanent one like an experiment can sink a quarter.

And then, at some point, you have to actually decide. This is where a surprising number of smart people wobble. Some wait for certainty that’s never coming. Some leap before they understand the problem. And some give answers so wrapped in “it depends” that nobody could ever hold them to anything.

The ones you want say something like: “We’re pushing the launch a week to fix onboarding. Here’s why.” One sentence, on time, with their name on it.

The part nobody interviews for: what happens next

A decision nobody acts on is just an opinion with good posture.

The people who make decisions land do the unglamorous work afterwards. They tell the folks who’ll be affected before those folks find out the hard way. They make it clear who does what next. And they’ve quietly thought about Plan B. If you’ve ever watched a confident rollout fail with no way back, you know exactly how expensive a missing Plan B can be.

Then reality shows up, as it always does, and the real test begins. Do they change their mind?

The honest answer should be: it depends on why. When new facts arrive, the best people update without ego. When the only new thing is a louder voice in the room, they hold their ground, politely. It’s a surprisingly rare combination. Most of us lean one way, either folding under pressure or digging in long after the data has moved on.

Why “tell me about a tough decision” doesn’t work

You’ve asked it. You’ve probably been asked it. And you already know what comes back: a well-rehearsed story, polished by hindsight, where everything worked out in the end.

You hear how it ended. You never see the messy middle. Did they question the brief? What did they skip? How did they react when the plan fell apart halfway through? Those are exactly the moments that separate a good decision-maker from a good storyteller, and an interview can’t reach them.

That’s why we built Unfound around job simulations. Instead of describing a decision they once made, candidates make one in front of you. They’re dropped into a realistic work scenario with a messy problem, more information than they need, and a clock running. Then, just like real work, the situation keeps moving. New facts appear. A stakeholder pushes back. The plan needs to bend.

You don’t get a story about how they think. You get to watch them think.

So who do you actually want?

Not the person who always has the answer first. You want the one who asks what’s really going on, looks at just enough, makes the call when it’s time, sees it through, and changes course for the right reasons, and only those.

That person rarely stands out on a resume. They’re very hard to miss once you see them work.